SOURCE: "Still the Poles Go on Living," in New York Times Book Review, May 17, 1970, pp. 4-5, 20.

In the following excerpt, Rothberg considers the themes of stoicism and endurance as represented by A Dreambook for Our Time.

For more than 200 years Poland has lived between the hammer of Germany and the anvil of Russia, cloven by partition after partition, inflamed by insurrection after insurrection, molded by anguish, tribulation and death. Still the Poles go on living, making love, drinking vodka—oh yes, drinking vodka!—and occasionally and sporadically working to rebuild their war-torn country They seem to be a people without incentive, their lives without luster, their spirits without hope. And yet, though over all of them hangs the pall of physical desolation and spiritual despair, the most interesting writing in Communist Europe—including the Soviet Union—has emerged from postwar Poland. These three novels [Leopold Buczkowski's Black Torrent...